B2B Marketing Blog - TopRank®

B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.

Interview: Amanda Watlington on Second Life and Blogs

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Amanda G. Watlington, Ph.D., APR of Searching for Profit

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Photo by Jeremy Zawodny

I first bumped into Amanda Watlington via AIM, (Association for Interactive Marketing) and then in person at a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference several years ago. Further collaboration occurred through involvement with the next iteration of AIM, the Direct Marketing Association’s Search Engine Marketing Council, of which Amanda was a past chair.

Amanda is famous for her in-depth knowledge of blogs, RSS and podcasting and she has one of the first popular books on the subject. However, this long time marketer’s roots are in public relations and she also has an extensive background with search marketing.


Interview: Amanda Watlington on Second Life and Blogs

Video Interview on Transparency and Social Media

The WebProNews video blog posted an interview Mike McDonald did with myself and Stephan Spencer during the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference where we talk about marketing and public relations issues with blogs and social media.

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Congrats to Mike, Chris and Richard on a great job with these videos!


Video Interview on Transparency and Social Media

Small Business Public Relations

Earlier this week Matt McGee of Small Business SEM blog did an interview with me about public relations for small businesses. Matt has had a lot of marketing experience so he asked some great questions that I think businesses small and large will benefit from.

Here are a few sample questions:

Are press releases better for traditional publicity purposes or for SEO purposes — or can the same release do both? How?

The same release can be used as an introduction to a publicity opportunity, but there is no substitute for human contact. Press release distribution alone rarely achieves media coverage. Contacting the media with a reference to a press release and unique story ideas can improve your chances of media coverage significantly. While a large percentage of journalists research press releases online, many continue to rely on press releases via email as a method of getting new story ideas.


Small Business Public Relations

Interview with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim

Spotlight on Search: Interview with Andy Beal

andy-beal.jpg I’ve known Andy Beal via blogging and search marketing conferences for a while now and had the privilege of speaking with him on a SEO Blogger and Reporter panel at the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Las Vegas.

While I had great respect for Andy’s accomplishments at building search marketing companies and developing top notch blogs, his performance during the panel was genuinely impressive. His grasp of the big picture and business aspects of search marketing were/are very insightful. My public relations firm has even hired Andy for some consulting on reputation management and I am happy to recommend him.


Interview with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim

Yahoo Panama – Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

Spotlight on Search: Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

John Slade
There has been quite a bit of buzz on the paid search marketing front with the launch of the new Yahoo! Search Advertising platform aka “Panama”. At the WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Yahoo! announced the launch during a sponsored lunch. Dan Zarrella did a good a review of that session here.

Our YSM account recently went through the upgrade and we’re going through the process of getting familiar with all the new platform features. After talking to my contact at Yahoo PR as well as Mona Elesseily from Page Zero who has written a book about the Yahoo Search Marketing program, I thought it would be good to get some insight directly from Yahoo for Online Marketing Blog readers. John Slade, Senior Director of Yahoo Global Product Management was kind enough to field a few questions for me.


Yahoo Panama – Interview with John Slade of Yahoo!

SES Chicago Videos – Neil Patel & Cameron Olthius

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well, maybe that should be Neil and Cameron of Advantage Consulting Services, since they are not strangers to after conference festivities nor are they strangers to some of the most successful social media optimization campaigns being run in the SEO industry. Cameron covers the fun part and Neil talks about the SMO or social media optimization panel he spoke on regarding Wikipedia.

 

Cameron and Neil write an excellent blog at Pronet Advertising.


SES Chicago Videos – Neil Patel & Cameron Olthius

Push and Pull PR on eMarketing Talkshow

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This Friday I will be doing an online radio interview with eMarketing Talkshow about “Push and Pull Online Public Relations”. I’ll be talking with Cindy Turrietta about the market opportunity with online PR, explaining the concept of push and pull with examples of each as well as considerations on measuring results.

With all the buzz about optimizing and marketing with social media as well as the emerging meme in public relations on the social media news release format, there is an opportunity to help marketers better understand how these concepts can be applied in a practical manner.

Too often tactics get promoted as the latest and greatest trends without any substance or real world references. This interview is intended to provide a framework for understanding how marketers and public relations professionals can increase their reach and ability to be found by consumers as wel as the media by incorporating SEO concepts along with PR and social media.


Push and Pull PR on eMarketing Talkshow

Marketing with Widgets – Interview with Lawrence Coburn

Spotlight on Search Interview with Lawrence Coburn

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I first met Lawrence Coburn when we presented together on a Public Relations panel during a WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference in Boston. Lawrence told a great story about being at the right place at the right time and taking proper advantage to build publicity for his web site, RateItAll.com.

At the recent Pubcon conference in Las Vegas, Lawrence presented on a panel about viral marketing where he focused on using widgets as a way to drive traffic and links. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend this session since I was presentingon a different panel at the same time, but Karen and Jolina did and they came back with excellent feedback. Multiple people mentioned this session to me actually, including Rand Fishkin in this video interview.


Marketing with Widgets – Interview with Lawrence Coburn

Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google

Spotlight on Search – Interview with Google’s Adam Lasnik

Adam Lasnik
One of the fun things about being involved with the search marketing industry is getting to meet really bright and interesting people. Whether they are long time SEO gurus, CEO’s of fast growing corporations or employees of the major search engines, this industry rarely disappoints with its variety of perspectives.

With the majority of search market share, most webmasters pay a significant amount of attention to Google. Google has done an increasingly good job of interacting with the webmaster community through the efforts of Matt Cutts and Vanessa Fox as well as Adam Lasnik. After having the chance to talk to Adam, I thought he and his job sounded pretty interesting and he agreed to do a short interview.


Interview with Adam Lasnik of Google

Interview with Chris Pirillo

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Normally when I do interviews, I categorize them under “Spotlight on Search or Spotlight on Blogging”, but Chris Pirillo doesn’t fit in just one category. He’s a bit of a renaissance man when it comes to all the enterprising projects, ventures and activities he’s involved with.

Chris started Lockergnome in 1996 and hosted TechTV’s “Call for Help” show for 2 years. He hosts a popular conference every year called Gnomedex which has been sponsored by the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. He’s written books, columns and many articles and he produces a popular online radio show.

I met Chris when I started writing about SEO on Lockergnome and in person at SES conferences. Chris did a podcast interview with me at SES New York in April and I’ve been threatening to interview this fellow Midwesterner (he’s from Iowa) for almost a year. Things finally worked out and I was able to do a short interview.


Interview with Chris Pirillo

Brian Clark on tubetorial.com

tubetorial

Earlier this month Brian Clark of Copyblogger launched a new service called tubetorial. The site offers video and screencast “how to’s” on several topics including:

  • Web development and technology tips
  • Internet marketing strategies and techniques
  • Legal issues for Internet content producers and marketers

More than that, Brian offers some great insight into Internet business models and the selling of information. Tubetorial produces videos on their own and are also accepting viewer submitted videos. I really liked the idea and pinged Brian for more info on tubetorial. (links were added by me)

Who started and is behind tubetorial?


Brian Clark on tubetorial.com

Interview with PRWeb CEO David McInnis

David McInnis
PRWeb is best known for being in the news distribution business. With the acquisition by public relations software firm Vocus last week, PRWeb has bumped up it’s own presence in the news. During the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose last week, I had the opportunity to talk to PRWeb CEO, David McInnis about the Vocus acquisition and what lies ahead for PRWeb.
What prompted the acquisition?

Lee, I will probably blog about this more in depth this week on the PRWeb blog. We have been talking with Vocus for well over a year now. The timing was not right until recently for a few reasons. First, I felt that I had a lot left to accomplish (read try) with PRWeb before I handed the reigns over to someone else. I wanted to do these things on my own to see if I could execute a few new enhancements on my own dime and vision. In the last year alone we have really changed the practice of PR.


Interview with PRWeb CEO David McInnis